S Hailes

Mobility as an integrated service through the use of naming

As Mobile IP is deployed, so the requirements for its deployment evolve, reflecting the actual use of IP networks today. This includes the ability to use Mobile IP with IPsec, NATs and multi-homed networks. Furthermore, new requirements arise as people start to use IP in scenarios where the whole network is mobile (e.g. military networks), and where edge-networks may not be IP-enabled (e.g. sensor networks), but there is a requirement to interoperate across an IP network. In all these cases, rather than engineering retro-fits, creating an increasingly complex network landscape with possible unforeseen feature interactions and dependencies, we would prefer an integrated architectural solution. We present, from our ongoing work, a solution that would seem to meet all these needs, through a modified use of naming and addressing. Our proposal is incrementally deployable and existing core network routers & routing protocols need not change.

Site-controlled secure multi-homing and traffic engineering for IP

Site multi-homing is an important capability in modern military networks. Resilience of a site is greatly enhanced when it has multiple upstream connections to the Global Information Grid, including the global Internet. Similarly, the ability to provide traffic engineering for a site can be important in reducing delays and packet loss over low-bandwidth and/or high-delay uplinks. Current approaches to site multi-homing and site traffic engineering (a) require assistance from a trusted network service provider; (b) inject significant additional routing information into the global Internet routing system. This approach reduces flexibility, does not scale and is a widespread concern today. The proposed Identifier-Locator Network Protocol (ILNP) offers backward compatible extensions for IPv6 to enable a site to (a) use multiple routing prefixes concurrently, without needing to advertise these more-specific site prefixes upstream to the sites service providers; (b) enables edge-site controlled traffic engineering and localised addressing, without breaking end-to-end connectivity. This feature combination provides both multi-homing and traffic engineering capabilities without any adverse impact on the routing system and does not require anything more than unicast routing capability in the provider network. ILNP enables concurrent multi-path transmission for a flow, without requiring multicast routing, to increase flow resilience to path interruptions. This technique has a secondary security benefit of reducing the risk of an adversary successfully blocking an ILNP flow via a Denial-of-Service attack on any single path or single link.

Mobility through naming: impact on dns

An Identifier/Locator addressing scheme can enable a new approach to mobile hosts and mobile networks. Identifier and Locator information is stored in Domain Name System (DNS) Resource Records. In our on-going work using the Identifier-Locator Network Protocol (ILNP), the DNS would be updated with new Locator values as hosts and/or networks move; new sessions would obtain the correct Locator(s) for a mobile host and/or mobile network from the DNS, in much the same way as currently happens for IP address resolution. However, this use of the DNS is not currently required for IP mobility. We examine the potential impact on DNS from using a naming approach to mobility.

Studying the impact of ubiquitous monitoring technology on office worker behaviours: The value of sharing research data

Pervasive computing is a continually, and rapidly, growing field, although still remains in relative infancy. The possible applications for the technology are numerous, and stand to fundamentally change the way users interact with technology. However, alongside these are equally numerous potential undesirable effects and risks. The lack of empirical naturalistic data in the real world makes studying the true impacts of this technology difficult. This paper describes how two independent research projects shared such valuable empirical data on the relationship between pervasive technologies and users. Each project had different aims and adopted different methods, but successfully used the same data and arrived at the same conclusions. This paper demonstrates the benefit of sharing research data in multidisciplinary pervasive computing research where real world implementations are not widely available.

Guest Editorial: Communications Challenges and Dynamics for Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles

The papers in this special issue focus on research and field trials of unmanned autonomous vehicles on land, in the air and underwater. The suite of selected papers covers key challenges that impact on the communications dynamics and behaviour of unmanned autonomous vehicles of varying size and resource capability and address UAV bridging, topology maintenance,path planning and link performance optimisation in highly changeable deployments.